North Korea: This groundbreaking method could be used to track Kim Jong-un's next missile

EXCLUSIVE: NORTH Korea has increasingly ramped up its aggressive rhetoric and pursuit for military successes under the reign on Kim Jong-un, now it appears there could be a way to predict when the despot could launch his next missile.

North Korea outputs a slew of propaganda that is viewable around the world

Professor Michael Lammbrau, from Mercyhurst University, has collaborated with researchers Taehee Whang and Hyung-min Joo from Yonsei and Korea University respectively to produce a machine learning technology with the ability to predict the rate of a nuclear missile test from Kim Jong-un with a reported accuracy of 73.2 per cent.

Mr Lammbrau exclusively told Express.co.uk: “Most of the work was done with Korean professors in South Korea and the paper slowly got published as I came to the US but there is continued work because while we are doing it in English currently we want to expand it.

“I can’t read every newspaper article and look for specific words, but we have the ability to process that and ask the computer if there are any patterns that happen right before a conflict or a missile test or a nuclear test and with those results. It does pretty well but it’s still not perfect.

“We want to set up a way to create an indicator and then the decision makers can at least be forewarned about the possibility increase. So it’s more about creating models that allow the decision makers to understand that they are sort of in dangerous territory with the rhetoric.”

Related articles

North Korea outputs a slew of propaganda that is viewable around the world through the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) website, the team used the work from despot leader Kim Jong-un to establish behavioural patterns emitted from the hermit state prior to a nuclear test that could be used to predict when the next one will take place.

The paper on the work produced by the team says: “We use a supervised machine learning (SML) technology in this paper.

“There are four steps in SML: data collection, document labelling, preprocessing, and model building and analysis.

“First, we collected all the KCNA articles published between 1997 and 2014 from its website.

North Korea has shown us its new missile

Thu, November 30, 2017

The missile dubbed the Hwasong-15 was shot into the sky before plunging down into the Sea of Japan

North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un is seen as the newly developed intercontinental ballistic rocket Hwasong-15Ã•s test was successfully launche

“Second, for SML to work, it is necessary to label KCNA articles as either threat or non-threat.

“All those KCNA articles published within a week prior to the three North Korean nuclear tests are labeled as ‘threat’ articles. By contrast, all those KCNA articles published during a 10-day period at least two months before or after the three North Korean nuclear tests are labelled as ‘non-threat’ or ‘peace’ articles.”

Words such as “a, the, on, at, to, and” which are “meaningless” to the machine are also removed from the propaganda.

The output was then divided into two categories, a training data set and a test data set.

The training data is comprised of 70 per cent of the articles taken while the test data set is the remaining 30 per cent.

The report added: “The training dataset was then used by a machine-learning process to develop a model that could differentiate between ‘threat’ articles and ‘non-threat’ articles in the test dataset.

“The model developed from the training dataset was then applied to the test dataset in order to check its accuracy. Importantly, for all the KCNA articles in the test dataset, we removed labels of ‘threat’ and ‘non-threat’.”

The machine learning method used is able to pick up words that appear with regularity in Kim Jong-un's propaganda pieces.

The paper added: “According to the Kim Jong-un model, the key words which separate nuclear threat articles from peace items during the period are ‘star,’ ‘satellite,’ ‘respected,’ ‘service,’ ‘sovereignty,’ and ‘defending’.”

The hardest countries in the world to visit

Fri, December 15, 2017

MAPPED: The hardest countries to travel to - and North Korea ISN'T the worst.

The word “star” was labelled as the most prominent word in articles that saw a nuclear test afterwards - the word is described as a homage to Kim Jong-un’s father, Kim Jong-il.

The document explained: “In fact, ‘the shining star (kwangmyŏngsŏng)’ is a euphemism which is regularly used by the North Korean media to refer to ‘Dear Leader Kim Jong-il.’

“As a result, it turns out that the most distinctive pattern of KCNA articles immediately prior to a nuclear test by the Kim Jong-un regime is a sudden increase of a symbolic reference to Kim Jong-il.”

North Korea is no stranger to hurling insults at the US with the word “dotard” being used to describe Donald Trump - the word is archaic and has not been used prominently for a couple hundred years.

However, Mr Lammbrau was keen to describe that the “boisterous language” of the Kim regime is not the main indicator of an imminent nuclear test.

He claimed: “Generally before and during the tests the rhetoric is tied to domestic legitimacy so what you get is really, really boisterous language. So they are bragging about the greatness of their culture, the greatness of their system. Then as soon as the international community responds then they respond with the negative sentiment.

Getty

North Korea has increasingly ramped up its aggressive rhetoric and pursuit for military successes

“If you track the sentiment which I’m currently doing - it’s all positive, it’s all full of pride and it spikes right before and during the test. You know they have parades, they shoot off missiles, they have rock concerts.

“The insults are there, they are always the thing that catches everybody’s eye, what the computer catches is the increase in the positive, prideful and boisterous language.”

The professor detailed that military celebrations allow the government of North Korea to escape ridicule from increased domestic issues.

Getty

Mr Lammbrau was keen to describe that the 'boisterous language' of the Kim regime

He went on: “It’s sort of a celebration of how good the system is, it’s a celebration of the people, their sacrifice, whatever it is because they are having trouble getting food or they can’t eat. They are sort of saying ‘well this justifies it, we are protecting the peninsula. It’s a pretty outrageous story but it works for them.”

The current paper from the research team does not include the analysis of North Korean propaganda for more recent nuclear tests from Kim Jong-un, however Mr Lammbrau stated he is currently working to update his analysis.

He said: “We can currently use machine learning to analyse the behaviour of Kim Jong-un to include up to his most recent missile test in 'English', however, the goal is to build a tool that can incorporate daily published articles, in various languages in order to improve understanding and overall accuracy in our models.”